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that Orpheus is under the command of SC Alvin Reed, and that the crew and I and all of USS-Transport are damned proud of what our brothers and sisters in the Survey branch are doing.”
    So are we all , Thackery thought. It’s easy to be proud. But would you trade places with them, Gerhard? Would you give up everything to be where they are?
    “We’ll be docking at Unity in just a few minutes, and there may be more information on the base net by the time we’re processed.”
    There was another spattering of applause as the end-of-message chimes sounded. His seat partner, apparently a member of the Universal Creation Church, joined several others on board in chanting aloud the opening phrases of the hour-long Prayer of Thanksgiving.
    Thackery, at once exhilarated by the news and fiercely jealous of Reed and the others aboard Orpheus , barely heard them. Fighting to contain both emotions, he turned his eyes toward Unity, his thoughts toward others’ past, his hopes toward his own future.
    Journa, Muschvnka, and Ross 128—all cold history, discovered long before I was born. And now Pai-Tem. Let there be more , Thackery begged silently as Vulpecula eased into the empty dock at the tip of Unity’s wing C.
    Let there be more! And leave one for Merritt Thackery. One world in a billion. Not so my name is applauded a hundred years later and a hundred trillion miles away. All I want is Jupiter again. To lose myself in the magic of discovery again. Because there can only be one first time .

THE PATHFINDERS
    (from Merritt Thackery’s
JIADUR’S WAKE)
    … The radio beacon from Mu Cassiopeia stirred a somnolent Earth into a social and technological metamorphosis, a metamorphosis symbolized by Tilak Charan’s Pride of Earth . Considering the technological, logistical, and sociological obstacles, the successful construction of Pride ranks as the high-water mark of Devaraja Rashuri’s reign.
    But Pride was the product of an infant technology. Its voyage was one of risk and hubris. Its mission meant an encounter with an alien society of unknowable inclination. Because Pride never returned nor reported, it was widely assumed that it had failed to survive. But no one could say which of the factors was to blame.
    As a result, the USS began to build the only survey ships explicitly authorized by the World Council. What turned out to be a follow-up mission was conceived as a pioneering one, and so the ships were collectively named The Pathfinders. Their individual names remembered the aerial vanguards of Odin and Noah: S2 Hugin, S3 Munin, and S4 Dove.(The honorary designation SI was assigned “posthumously” to Pride of Earth herself.)
    Where Pride of Earth had been a fragile lifeboat, the Pathfinders were comparative dreadnoughts. Three years after Jiadur reached Earth, they set off for the Mu Cass system. There they “discovered” Journa, its inhabitants, and one lone survivor from Pride of Earth —a meeting thereafter commemorated on both worlds in the annual Reunion Day festivities.
    But that meeting was also the beginning of the Service’s colony problem. The Journans claimed to be children of Earth, a claim that proved as irrefutable as it was inexplicable. How could a space-going technological culture have flourished on Earth ten or a hundred thousand years ago and then vanished without a trace? What twisting of history could allow for such a dissonant fact?
    There were no answers on Journa.
    Absent appropriate instructions, the Pathfinders separated and began a roundabout return to Earth. Their self-set purpose was to define the parameters of the problem by searching for other possible remnants of the First Colonization. If there were none, then perhaps some relatively painless revisionism might suffice—
    Then Hugin , under the command of Kellen Brighamton, found a neoprimitive human community on a planet orbiting the white dwarf component of 40 Eridani. When Brighamton’s report on the Muschynka reached Earth, it became